


A Study in Nightmares

by thesignsofserbia



Series: A Study in Nightmares [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, PTSD John (mentioned), PTSD Sherlock, Past Torture, Post-The Empty Hearse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, set somewhere in or after series 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 12:28:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesignsofserbia/pseuds/thesignsofserbia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s virtually never melodramatic, it’s not tragic and it’s not emotional. It's life.</p><p>But just occasionally… There are moments when there are cracks in the armour. There are times when it is absolutely all of those things, and he finds that very annoying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study in Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> A sort of very loose Companion piece to A Cure For Insomnia. You don't have to read that at all for this to make sense.

 

 

Sherlock suffers from nightmares, which is unsurprising given the circumstances. He can’t remember having dreamt very often before now and if he had then he’d probably deleted them as irrelevant.

  
He doesn’t sleep as regularly as most so when he did it was a deep sleep, crashing for 18 hours after a case.

  
He’d had terrible fever induced terrors and hallucinations when he was ill as a child, drug induced hazes too, but that was a bit different and he didn’t count it.

  
He was certain that he must have experienced bad dreams at one point in his life but they clearly hadn’t left a lasting impression.

  
He knew exactly what they were of course and there was no point denying what was happening to him.  
He knew what to look for; recognising John’s symptoms in his own behaviour was easy.

  
He didn’t consider it to be a weakness for this precise reason but he had initially and he knew that John saw it that way (if only in himself) despite knowing logically and medically that it was a normal response to trauma.

  
Mycroft was an idiot. John was haunted by memories of the war and he didn’t miss it. He missed the excitement and the adrenaline of it, not watching young men disfigured and bleeding out under his hands. No, John may be acclimatised to violence and he functioned well under pressure but he didn’t enjoy the bloodshed.  
What John Watson missed was being useful.

  
John’s PTSD had been obvious to him from the start and John certainly wasn’t weak.

  
So John had changed his mind, Sherlock’s own experiences hadn’t left him broken after all. Because any label he put on himself would have automatically been applied to John as well. John was not weak so neither was he, at least not in this capacity.

  
The reasoning was flawed (it was an _‘I can pour tea, a teapot can pour tea; therefore I am a teapot’_ style of argument) but it was logical.

  
John gave him hope also because he’d seen how the expressions of his trauma had decreased in severity over time.

  
John used to cry out from his nightmares, especially in the first few months of living together, Sherlock could hear him shouting all the way from the floor below.

  
On these occasions Sherlock passed the time playing Bach, Mozart, and Debussy, Beethoven and more in an endless stream, calming John without confronting him.

  
There were, in society, many unspoken _rules_ everyone had silently agreed to uphold concerning privacy. He was exceptionally good at noticing what was happening around him, but things like this sometimes didn’t occur to him, and no one had explained it to him. Even if he had ‘gotten the memo’ (a rather bizarre American phrase) he would have disregarded it anyway for its inconvenience.

  
He woke John by throwing clothes at his face, giving him 10 minutes to get ready or he was leaving for the crime scene without him. He borrowed John’s things without asking, he confiscated and broke into his laptop and he had no regard for personal space.

  
Once he’d burst into John’s bedroom because he needed to ask him something important, not paying attention to the naked woman in John’s bed, she was irrelevant. John was furious. He’d been pushed from the room so forcefully that he’d nearly overbalanced and fallen down the stairs. Very rude.

  
But for some reason in matters concerning John’s Post-Traumatic Stress he felt compelled to be discrete.

  
And so he’d lose himself in the music. Sometimes John came down and made himself a cup of tea, watching Sherlock from his armchair. The first few times John only crept halfway down the stairs to listen, hesitant to come any closer. Sometimes John would return straight back to sleep to the sound of the violin. Sometimes, if Sherlock was quick enough, he could recognise the signs and head the nightmare off before it woke him, soothing his blogger into a calmer state. Sometimes John lay awake all night, just listening.  
Sherlock always knew which one it was, but he could never predict his reaction on any given night.

  
Sherlock didn’t stop playing until sunrise, his fingers bleeding on the strings.

  
John never complained about the nocturnal concerts if he’d had a bad dream, did he know that it was deliberate?

  
Mrs Hudson cared though. She had a soft spot for him a mile wide, but she didn’t appreciate him ‘tearing the soul from that poor instrument’ at 4am. She often complained that he only made beautiful music in the middle of the night, he argued that creativity doesn’t have concept of time and never breathed a word of his actual motivation.

  
John’s dreams of the war became fewer and farther in between, flaring up after the confrontation at the pool but steadily declining in frequency and the ones that he did have were noticeably milder.

   
~

   
Knowing what was causing them didn’t really help him in the face of it, not when he had to experience the reality of it.

  
The nightmares occurred seemingly randomly, but regularly since he’d come home. They were hard to predict and he didn’t have them every night, but enough. He’s tired even though he’s done little but rest.

  
He’s slept more in the past few weeks than was ever normal for him, even taking the nightmares into account. He’s still exhausted but in his defence he spent two years doing little but running, it was bound to catch up with him.

  
That doesn’t make it better, nothing about this is easy. It’s not even theatrical. He’s just plodding along where he used to race and leap and fly. He’s not pleased about it but there’s nothing he can do so he accepts it. The nightmares are a quiet weight.

  
Calling out was unusual for him. Most nights he didn’t make much sound to speak of and wasn’t prone to thrashing around. He wouldn’t wake with a start and he usually knew where he was. It was just like waking from a normal dream but with the drawback of being momentarily paralysed with fear.

  
It was mundane if anything, he’d have a nightmare and he’ll find it unbearable at the time but by the morning he can forget it ever happened.

  
Most of the time he’s not unhappy.

  
He has a particularly involved one however, and he does shout. As was always going to eventuate; John hears him.

~

   
_His wrists are chained too tightly. There is a presence in the room stalking him as it approaches. He flinches, desperately trying to pull away._

  
_Synaesthesia purple seeps in from the edges, poisoning his vision and effectively blinding him. He can’t see._

  
_This was fear, this was real terror. If Sherlock could bottle the essence of this moment with all its details; his pathetic whimpering, the reek of the room and the deafening techno music still ringing in his ears, then it would be far more potent a drug that anything the scientists on the H.O.U.N.D project could come up with._

  
_It wasn’t even necessary to touch him anymore, not when merely occupying space in his vicinity was enough to make him petrified._  
_They didn’t have to hurt him, but they did anyway._

  
_If they’d known who he was, they’d congratulate themselves for some of the methods that they used, it was not an easy thing to effectively torture someone with as high a pain tolerance as his._

  
_The music, if you could call it that, was violent and without variation. It was a full out assault on his senses, scrambling his brain, over stimulating him until he could barely string a coherent thought together. The light was blinding, or completely absent or strobing until he writhed. The speakers only stopped when someone entered the room._

  
_This type of mind games, this psychological torment was more devastating to him than any physical damage they had inflicted or ever could._

  
_Sherlock knew that he was asleep because everything was warped and pulsing out at him like a 3D film but despite that his mind had accurately reconstructed not only the picture of it but everything about the memory._

  
_There was nothing but the swirling purple smoke in the emptiness beyond the confines of the room. It was impossible to escape but even if he’d had the chance there was nowhere to go and nothing but this._

  
_His antagonists were invisible to him, if it was just a memory, just a fabrication then why could he still vividly feel every moment of the pain? It hurt so much, he couldn’t bear it. How was he still alive? Why wouldn’t they let him die?_

  
_He was close to breaking, he knew that. He’d never tell them who he was, but that was easy, because he’d pushed it so far down into the depths of his mind that he wouldn’t have been able to tell you without actively searching for the name. He knew he was protecting someone. It was important. There was a vague recollection of an exasperated man with salt and pepper hair who could have been his father, but he wasn’t certain._

_  
No. He wouldn’t answer their questions, which sounded wrong somehow, when spoken in English._

  
_He was going to break though. And soon._

  
_His mind was going to be torn apart and ripped into tiny squares of purple tissue paper, his heart consumed in violet flames until mind and heart together dissolved into ashes to be blown away by the East Wind. He could feel it, they were so close._

  
~

   
He came aware of his surroundings slowly, his eyes feeling gritty and gummed shut. The whole thing was decidedly anticlimactic. He knows he’s crying and he doesn’t even try to stop. He stares at his bedroom ceiling. It had been terrible but perfect in essence, it had felt so real.

  
His awareness is coming back sluggishly and the panic starts to rise as he notices another person in the room.

  
“Sherlock?”

  
It looks like John and it sounds like John but Sherlock’s brain is too jumbled to be 100% certain that it’s not a trick.  
The man who resembles John is frozen at the foot of the bed, reminding him of John when he’d ‘rescued’ him from the lab at Baskerville.

  
“Where am I?”

  
His voice is shredded, he was shouting then, explains why John (?) is here. The person that he hopes is his friend becomes alarmed by the question.

  
“Sherlock, you know where you are, look around you,” whoever he is, this person is desperate to convince himself that Sherlock is in fact aware of his surrounding, he’s worried.

  
“Humour me,” he continues to stare at the ceiling.

  
The man tells Sherlock that he’s safe inside his own bedroom, and Sherlock doesn’t react until he elaborates.

  
“You’re in London at 221B Baker Street. We’re in your bedroom of our flat, and I am John Watson. Your name is Sherlock Holmes and you never buy the milk.”

  
He nods, satisfied.

  
He’s still crying.

  
Then something occurs to him and as an afterthought he repeats his question from before;

  
“Где сам ја?”

  
John blinks, “What? Sherlock I don’t understand.”

  
Good. Sherlock relaxes. He’s home and he can think again.

  
“What was that, what did you say?” John’s confused but he doesn’t need to know and Sherlock doesn’t want to tell him, so he just says simply;

  
“A question that you didn’t know the answer to.”

  
But John still looks horrified for some reason, even though they’d cleared that up. Sherlock is scaring him and hasn’t stopped crying which isn’t helping. By his estimate John’s only seen genuine tears from him once on the roof top at St. Barts (not _actually_ see them, but hear them in his voice) and once in a train carriage rigged to explode

He sweeps an eye over his flatmate and what he observes from him is not good. John has likely been standing there for quite some time, long enough to understand. He’d come to Sherlock’s aid hearing him screaming in agony, been rooted to the spot by what he’d witnessed.

  
Sherlock had been screaming that much was evident, but it was entirely probable that he’d also been whimpering, sobbing and begging for mercy. John’s brain is likely running through the scenarios that could reduce Sherlock of all people, to this.

  
John approaches slowly and pulls Sherlock to him to shelter him from the world. And Sherlock lets him mostly for John’s own benefit. He’s lethargic as John cradles him murmuring inane platitudes. Sherlock is just sort of hollow.

  
It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate John caring for him it just isn’t of any use to him and he is not especially comforted by it. But it doesn’t bother him either and if it helps John then that’s something.

  
“You’re alright Sherlock; you’re okay.” John attempts to console him.

  
“No.”

  
He’s not okay. But he isn’t about to fall apart.

  
John stills and Sherlock regrets that his friend now feels helpless, perhaps he should’ve lied. He stays with Sherlock though and it’s nothing like the films he subjects Sherlock to, he’s not wide awake and agonising over the details of the dream, he drifts off again quite quickly despite knowing that he might just endure it all again. These things are often dramatized and exaggerated and he can’t comprehend why. They’re not glamourous.

  
Sherlock sleeps relatively soundly that night but he suspects John does not.

   
~

   
It would have been tolerable though. The nightmares were bad but he could have taken them in his stride, he would have adapted. Except, they didn’t always stop when he was awake. This was a problem.

  
The flashbacks are so much worse. It’s one thing to be afraid by things in your sleep because you are vulnerable to your subconscious, so he figures that’s fair game. It is another thing for it to happen in the middle of the day. Because if he cannot control his own body and mind when he is conscious then what use is he to anyone?

  
The smallest things seem to cause it and he never sees it coming.

  
He’s in the shower on a dull Tuesday morning with the hot water turned up very high, when John starts up Mrs Hudson’s washing machine downstairs. The pipes are old and unreliable and do not like to multitask, so he’s washing his hair, careful to keep the water off his face when the water runs freezing without warning as all the hot is diverted down to John.

  
He’s startled and he lets out a choked yelp as fragments of images and sounds rush at him, one after another as Serbia screams back into his brain.

  
_There’s a bag over his head and he’s utterly powerless to move as frigid water pours into his mouth and nose. There’s no air and he can’t breathe; there’s **no air**!_

  
There is plenty of oxygen available to him, and he _can_ breathe, but in his panic he slips, throwing his right arm out to break the fall reflexively. It takes all his weight but it still isn’t completely healed and his knees buckle from the stab of old pain. He crashes rather ungracefully onto the tiles and the hot water comes back on suddenly, hammering down on his back as he sits in the tub panting in shock.

  
_He remembers when he stayed at Mycroft’s house ‘recuperating’ upon his return to London. He didn’t remember how it had happened because he’d been on a lot of medication at the time and the sections of his brain that had shut down to protect themselves hadn’t all booted up again. Mycroft told him that he’d drifted about the place like a ghost for the first few days, he had been there, but he hadn’t been present._

  
_He **was** a ghost, and he’d said as much but Mycroft hadn’t liked that, not at all. He’d told him not to speak that way. Maybe his brother thought he was mad, he remembered thinking; perhaps he was.  
_

  
_Regardless of how it had happened, he’d woken up on the floor of the shower with the cold tiles against his cheek. Mycroft had been there, actually in the shower in his shirt and trousers, soaked through. He had been trying to rouse him unsuccessfully for some time and he was a lot less put together than he usually was. His voice was a whole octave higher. He’d had difficulty standing on muscles that had wasted away, so it was hardly surprising that he’d fallen. Mycroft had helped him to bed and they hadn’t spoken of it again._

  
_He hadn’t been well_

  
Sherlock sits there under the spray for a long time, not thinking about anything at all.

  
As he dries himself off, he wonders when his life had deteriorated into a poorly written young adult novel.

  
~

   
It was even more dangerous when it interfered with the work.

 

He and John were on a delightfully stimulating case, having just run about 3 miles through the convoluted streets of London on a crowded Saturday evening. They have left all of the police for dead i  
their dust, except Lestrade, who looked like he had pushed through more than one pain barrier and risked having a coronary just to stay with them. Which was impressive. But he was still 60m behind.

  
He and John had just caught up to the perpetrator, who happened to be an armed serial rapist, on Waterloo Bridge. The man fired a shot at them.

  
Sherlock had already begun to dive to the right, pulling John with him when at the same time John gave Sherlock a hard shove in the opposite direction. The bullet miraculously missed both of them with John falling to the right before tackling the bastard before he could aim again. They both got out of the firing line but Sherlock’s momentum carried him backwards, over the railing and into the Thames.

  
The fall alone easily could have killed him, but he’d always been good at cheating death.

  
John screamed Sherlock’s name in dismay but he’d only just managed to overpower the offender and the man was struggling like hell, it was all he could do to pin him down as he fought for his life.

  
Lestrade caught up and dashed to the barrier praying to every god he could think of that Sherlock wasn’t dead…again. When Sherlock broke through the surface he breathed a sigh of relief, he was somehow conscious and seemingly unharmed. Despite the fact that it was bitterly cold, Greg wasn’t too worried because he knew Sherlock was a strong swimmer.

  
But Sherlock didn’t calmly swim to the shore and he wasn’t furious about the indignity of it all. Greg knew instinctively that something was wrong and took off again, sprinting to get down and help him. Greg was not a lucky man and there was no way he was risking the jump himself, so he ran for the shore.

  
Sherlock was thrashing erratically, his arms pin-wheeling as he struggled to tread water in his heavy coat. The murky, stinking great river was pressing in on him from all sides, compressing his chest and he kept slipping under.

  
_It was so cold and he was going to asphyxiate. Sherlock was drowning. He was going to die right here in this cell._

  
Greg swam out quickly to reach him but approached carefully. He knew that in this state if he went to his aid, Sherlock would desperately latch onto him, a dead weight, and instead of rescuing him, they would both drown. You must never attempt to save a man panicking in the water if you cannot calm him; basic police training told him that, it was harsh but imperative; the first D in DRABCD was often overlooked.

  
Sherlock’s was wild but he snapped out of it exceptionally quickly at the sound of Greg’s voice. They stared at each other with wide eyes for a moment before they washed up back onto the shore, by the time they’d reached it and Greg had helped him out of his saturated coat Sherlock was calm and irritated. If Greg hadn’t seen it himself he would never have known that just moments ago this man had suffered a severe panic attack, nearly drowning himself as a result.

  
He’d looked Greg in the eye as they shivered in the mud and the sirens grew louder.

  
“Don’t tell John.”

  
That was probably for the best.

  
~

  
The nightmares didn’t stop with the introduction of the flashbacks. They didn’t get better and they didn’t get worse. He knows John is worried, but he acts normally and he doesn’t treat Sherlock any differently. For this Sherlock will be eternally grateful, John’s pity would have been unbearable. This is not part of his identity, he will not feel sorry for himself and he certainly will not let it consume him. He tries not to let things he can’t change bother him.

  
Life goes on; time is oblivious to the movements of men. They solve cases, Sherlock is brilliant, and John complains about his experiments. Sherlock is A-Bit-Not-Good; John blogs about it and Sherlock…never forgets an article of clothing. He doesn’t so much as roll up his sleeves.

  
It’s virtually never melodramatic, it’s not tragic and it’s not emotional. It’s life.

  
But just occasionally… There are moments when there are cracks in the armour. There are times when it is absolutely all of those things, and he finds that very annoying.

~

   
Sherlock wakes feeling defeated and alone.

  
John’s soldier instincts are not as sharp as they once were so he doesn’t stir until the mattress dips under Sherlock’s weight. John is groggy and confused as to Sherlock’s motives initially as he crawls under the duvet. The narrow single bed was not designed to hold both of them and he slots his long frame into John’s with some difficulty.

  
He doesn’t offer an explanation because he doesn’t have one in the first place and the words won’t come so he simply buries his face into John’s neck in distress.

  
John gets the message. Sherlock has no ulterior motive and that he is not being manipulated. Something is not right.

  
Sherlock doesn’t know why tonight in particular but he doesn’t care. He feels fragile and wrung out and can’t shake the preposterous notion that John will be able to hold him together, that he’ll shatter without him.

  
He’s coming undone at the seams. His sutures aren’t as expert as John’s would have been and the wounds haven’t closed up properly. His father told him once that every person has a limit that they cannot surpass. A human being can only take so much.

  
It’s too much.

  
John can surely feel the despondence in his posture and he wills him not to turn him away. He absolutely needs this right now, he needs John.

  
He can’t help it; he’s shaking, only barely but steadily, with his jaw clenched. The muscles in his forehead shift against the underside of John’s jaw as he scrunches up his face, fighting for control.

  
The detective needs him to pretend that he doesn’t notice Sherlock’s failings, to turn a blind eye to the fact that he is a grown man crying into his flatmate. He’s not making a sound or shedding any tears but he’s crying all the same.

  
It’s a tense and repressed sort of misery, it’s bleeding out through his every pore and he can’t stop it, it’s impossible to contain. The hurt builds with increasing pressure in your skull, behind your sternum until it finally either explodes, killing you or it forces its way from your tear ducts, oozing from the spaces between your ribs.

  
Maybe he is mad after all. And to think he was doing so well.

 

  
John is shocked to see Sherlock suffering this much. Sherlock had never been an especially emotive person and he could be hard to read. He’d known that something was bothering him but he hadn’t seen this coming.

  
They’re not touching a lot considering how close they are, just Sherlock’s head and legs are pressed against him but he can feel him trembling. John feels awkward because he isn’t sure what to do with his free arm, or if he’s allowed to cross that barrier. John wishes his friend would trust him enough give up some of the weight, to lean on him. He wants to help make it better, but he’s not sure if Sherlock will let him.

  
Sherlock will probably delete this night from his ‘hard drive’ entirely which was frustrating but that’s just how it was for them, and it would be hypocritical of John to try and make him face it.

  
He knew that this brand of pain was in a different category and Sherlock was handling it admirably well (much better than he had) but that the type of memory that caused it would be unlikely to go away soon.

  
Sherlock was starting to calm down, he’d been disturbingly quiet throughout and John decided to leave him be and drifted back off to sleep.

  
He was a doctor to the core and his Hippocratic Oath and his desire to look after Sherlock left him torn, but he remembered what his life had been like before he met this mad genius.

  
Sherlock had saved him completely deliberately but in a low key way, he hadn’t focussed on John’s weaknesses. He’d made light of the limp, batting his cane away with easy and he’d helped a great deal more than he knew with the dreams, though he wasn’t fooled. Sherlock Holmes did nothing without a reason. More than anything he’d given John a purpose in life, he’d stopped him from eating his gun.

  
He hoped in time to return the favour, he would give Sherlock whatever he needed, no matter how difficult, even if that was nothing at all.

 

 


End file.
